Developing the Arabidopsis Information Portal

The Arabidopsis Information Portal (AIP) is a five-year project to support the Arabidopsis thaliana research community with a federated database and web application. The AIP three-tier structure will include a user interface, a data layer and an interconnecting web services layer. A key feature of the data layer will be an Arabidopsis-specific instance on InterMine (ThaleMine), a database widely used by the animal model organism community that can accept and integrate a wide variety of data types. AIP will initially populate ThaleMine with Col-0 structural and functional annotation derived from TAIR, and expression and protein interaction data provided by the Bio-Analytic Resource as proof-of-concept. Additional and more diverse data types will be added progressively. A longer term goal will be to develop a web 2.0, cross-platform web portal, providing a fully-customizable user interface with a variety of data analysis apps, and third party data integration provided directly by web services.

The concept of the Arabidopsis Information Portal (AIP) was developed by working groups convened by the International Arabidopsis Informatics Consortium (IAIC) following the decision by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to discontinue funding The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) that culminated in a Design Workshop held in December 2011. AIP will be constructed by a partnership including the J. Craig Venter Institute, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the University of Cambridge, UK and the Carnegie Institution for Science.

Supported by grant DBI-1262414 from the National Science Foundation